Finding Facebook Niche Audience Insights | Social Media

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Whether you use social media to keep up with family members, play Candy Crush, check out the hottest restaurants, or manage your company’s social community, you’re part of a huge virtual community. Chances are that Facebook knows a lot about you – and the other 1 billion users worldwide.

If you’re a typical Facebook user, consider the amount of data that you share in a month: restaurants you’ve been to, new birth announcements, a new brand you like, videos you’ve shared… Simply put, the value proposition for advertising on Facebook is incredible. And over the last few years, marketers have begun taking advantage of the opportunity that Facebook provides.

In the past, Facebook offered marketers some useful advertising tools, such as Page Insights, which is a great way to identify the types of content that resonate well with your current audience. However, this year, Facebook decided to give even more insights to marketers through a tool called Facebook Audience Insights.

Where Page Insights allows you gain information about your current audience, Audience Insights allows you to discover information about potential audiences you could target. This gives you the chance to expand your company’s reach to new and profitable corners of the market.

So how might Audience Insights be used? As an example, let’s say that I own a coffee mug business where I sell customized mugs online. In the past, I’ve had a lot of success targeting IT/software professionals because they seem to drink a lot of coffee. Recently, however, I read an article from Business Insider and learned that public relations is one of the most coffee-crazy professions. I decided that it might be a good idea to begin targeting PR professionals with social ads. With Facebook’s helpful tools, reaching this audience is just a few steps away:

Step 1: Facebook Ads will allow me to view information about users who specify public relations as an Interest, through factors such as Demographics, Page Likes, Location, Activity, Household, or even Purchasing.

Step 2: I can then use Audience Insights to find pages that these users (who are presumably PR workers) like! In this example, the top page is Vocus (a cloud-based marketing and public relations software), which has approximately 232,000 likes on Facebook.

Step 3: From there, I can head over to Ad Manager and create an ad to target users who like Vocus.

If it weren’t for Audience Insights, I may not have ever known what Vocus was, and I would have missed out on a vast potential audience for my business.

This is obviously just one example of the power of Facebook Audience Insights. We can get much more granular. In any case, it’s clear that this feature allows social media marketing – and therefore your business – to expand in new ways.

At BFO, we use technology like this on a daily basis to help our clients broaden their reach and take their brand to the next level. It’s not just about what works now – it’s about pushing the marketing envelope and helping businesses reach their potential.

If you’re looking to implement a social media marketing strategy for your business, you can learn more here.